


A Bottle, Fully Drained

by thatsrightdollface



Category: Transistor (Video Game)
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Angst, Scene Analysis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-01
Updated: 2019-09-01
Packaged: 2020-10-04 21:11:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20477540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: Her old friend… with the bandages wound up his wrists and those low chuckles deep in his throat, all defiant honesty and soft eyes and cold flatbread over coffee in the morning...  had promised her his skin was empty, now.





	A Bottle, Fully Drained

**Author's Note:**

> Hi there!!! I hope you enjoy this, if you read it. I'm sorry for any and all mistakes I might've made~

Her old friend… with the bandages wound up his wrists and those low chuckles deep in his throat, all defiant honesty and soft eyes and cold flatbread over coffee in the morning... had promised her his skin was empty, now. That particular throat and those familiar, broad hands were like a wax figure’s, somehow, all of a sudden. Something untouched and far away. They weren’t a part of him at all.

“Don’t worry, Red. I can’t feel a thing,” he’d said. He said it like he knew it would reassure her — he’d been forced out of his human skin, yeah, but _he_ _wasn’t gone_, and he wouldn’t be hurt even if what was left of his body fell apart. What he’d been was changed, sure… But he was as with her as he could be all the same. He was trapped and glowing in the sword she dragged behind her as she took a couple stumbling steps forward. He was right by her side.

Red’s old friend had carried her around before, from time to time — sometimes home on his back when she was drunk and giggling... Sometimes into a spinning hug after he won an under-the-table boxing match and she came over threatening to splash him in the face with some celebratory sports drink. But he was so tall, compared to her. Broad shoulders. She had never expected to be the one carrying _him_.

His mouth wasn’t supposed to go this slack unless he was sleeping, right? Unless she could shake him awake to catch the end of a picture show. His hair was falling so she couldn’t even see if his eyes were still open —

“Red. That’s not me,” he said, and she knew her old friend was trying very hard to sound calm. Almost teasing. She could hear a frantic current running through his words, too, though... A sort of desperation, wanting to pull her back to him. He had just died, after all – or _physically_ died – and traded that slumped-over skin of his to keep her breathing just the way she was.

Red held the hilt of his sword so tightly. She wondered if he could feel her hands shaking. 

But no — her old friend had said he couldn’t feel anything from Cloudbank, right? Not her hand, not the concrete, not the pinchy shoes she knew he’d worn that night as a favor to her. So he’d look extra nice, and all that jazz. Red’s old friend never felt comfortable going to these gaudy, polished-up places where she performed nowadays — he had wanted to live by the sea.

Red wondered if she should crouch down and pry those uncomfortable shoes off his feet, now. He wasn’t the type to be embarrassed by whatever socks he’d worn. Not if _she_ wasn’t embarrassed by them, anyway. And she wouldn’t be, not here, not now, not even if they were one of the bad pairs. She wondered if she should kiss his cheek, or smooth his hair, or tip his neck back into a more comfortable position. Something to say g — 

No. Red wouldn’t be saying goodbye, would she? Even just thinking about that made her hold the sword-that-was-him a little tighter, shifting it around so she was practically hugging her old friend to her chest. Even if he couldn’t feel her grip, he could know how he was being held, right? She watched the lights along his blade flicker as he took in a breath. He didn’t need to breathe at all.

_“Just skin and bones, nothing inside —” _

Red had written those lyrics a while back, but when they floated through her head now they felt so changed. Her song, “The Spine.” It would remind her of this moment, from now on, wouldn’t it? Of seeing his bones and skin for what they were, what they had to be, without him. 

“Let’s get you out of here,” Red’s old friend said, very softly, and she wished she could have told him she wanted to close his eyes, at the very least. In another age, there might have been a place in all this electronically pulsing city to bury him.

Red didn’t close her old friend’s eyes, though, you know. It’s possible he wouldn’t have wanted her to. He compared that empty body of his to a bottle that had been drunk completely dry, just a little later on… Her old friend was speaking very carefully, at the time, as though he was afraid to scare her. He didn’t have to say looking at his own corpse had been lonely and frightening: Red knew it had been already. Of course she knew. But it was interesting to hear how he felt like his self — the wine, the whiskey, the realness that mattered — had just been poured into a new container, so they might as well leave the old one behind. 

Red would imagine her old friend’s soul as a spill-able, ethereal liquid, for a second, then, and shiver. She would think about how she’d soaked up so many spilled souls into the Transistor... into his sword... like some kind of terrifying cosmic sponge. Mopping up the Camerata’s mess.

Red and her old friend would be talking in the Country, by the time _that_ conversation came around, and she would be able to see the thoughtful tiredness in his eyes. She would be able to grip her old friend’s calloused hand and half-jokingly get him to promise never to go pouring his soul out anywhere else. She would get to mix drinks with him and watch him slouch down into a chair, breathing softly, smirking at something she said. After spending some time without a voice, it would be a bit of a relief to see he still found her jokes funny.

Red would get to do all of that, soon enough, with the whole world drained dry around the Transistor that held them both. It would be their ship, hanging still in an empty bottle. A single weed sprouting through endless concrete. All that was left, after the Process, after the unraveling, after Red found herself so horribly chosen.

But not yet.

Give it a minute.

For now, Red carried her old friend’s poured-out soul away from the foot of his body, holding on to his voice like a light in the darkest place she’d ever been. 


End file.
